Can Trump Save Journalism

In 'Fake News' Era, J-schools Seeing Enrollment Spike

Journalism
is suffering. I hear and read this nearly every day, online, over the radio,
and in the ever-thinner publications cast onto my driveway each morning.
Schools of journalism are going out of vogue, if not out of business entirely. “Lack
of money and interest,” states the Chicago Tribune, has led to
the shutdown of some 40 percent of Chicago area schools’ student newspapers less
than ten years.

But at the same time, we
are awash in multiple media. Young people, in particular, walk about quite
regularly with their faces and fingers fused to smartphones, checking on
updates to share or re-tweet or otherwise zap through cyberspace. And much of
the media that is being so zapped is promulgated by vast numbers of “citizen
journalists” with their own websites, blogs, newsletters, and pulpits. It is
popular, popularized “news.”

Is this all a paradox?
Is it “fake news”? Has J given way?

It certainly perplexes
me.

I know, for instance,
that ever since the days of pre-Christian Rome, when the Acta Diurna was
published on a daily basis to announce to the city’s inhabitants any
and all actions that might affect them, including government meetings,
gatherings of large and small groups and sub-groups, taxation details, and the
like, people have been curious to know what is going on about them; we humans
have a nose for news.

I know, too, that, as a
late 2017 Pew Research finding put it, “the overall decline in circulation and
revenue” for print newspapers had hit 10 percent year over year; The Atlantic has referred to the
continuing decrease in subscriptions to hard-copy newspapers and newsmagazines
as a “Print Apocalypse.”

But another Pew Research
report states that “roughly 9 in 10 (93 percent) Americans get at least some
news online.” Fortune magazine adds that people seem to prefer to buy things
online rather than to enter brick-and-mortar stores, too; as of 2016,
Fortune reports, “consumers are doing most of their shopping online.”

So, people still seem to
be interested in the markets around them, the societies that surround them, and
the interactions that news feeds may nourish them with.

Continuing with the paradox, The American Journalism Reviewreported
massive declines in J-school enrollments during the first decade and a half of
the 21st Century. But now something interesting is taking place.
Maria LaMagna of MarketWatch calls
it “the latest Trump bump”, and I might be wont to call it “the turning point
of the J”: “Applications have jumped at journalism schools throughout the
country,” LaMagna wrote in April, 2018. The University of Southern California’s
Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, she found, “saw its
highest-ever number of first-year applicants this year.” And Northwestern
University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Communications has seen a
24 percent rise in applicant numbers for the upcoming academic year.

LaMagna quotes a
J-school student in California as saying: “We as students are concerned we
haven’t been paying attention...we have to study the news and how it is made.”
And The Independent Media Institute’s
Rory O’Connor quotes a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student journalist
as having said, “in its own right, journalism is its own form of activism.”
Cincinnati’s Elder High School Purple
Quill student newspaper reports on itself, stating that the paper “can
highlight all the good our school really does, and it can highlight discussion.”
A student-run newspaper gives learners practice in editing and proofreading, as
well as in learning critical thinking, proper research methods, and objectivity
and analysis.

And yet, as the Chicago Tribune article pointed out, and
the Cincinnati students echoed in their publication, schools that are hurting
for money and that are seeking likely candidates for curriculum cutting have
been finding that J-programs are good ones to do away with. This is so, even
though, as Stoneman Douglas student newspaper co-editor Rebecca Schneid has
said on CNN television: “The purpose of journalism is to raise the voices of
people that maybe don’t have a voice,” to make change.

Stoneman Douglas, Elder,
the University of Southern California and Northwestern must be seen, I believe,
as refreshing trend-turners, schools where J can give students just-in-time
justice, a voice that might well not be heard otherwise.

I write this blog entry
as a hopeful cry that journalism courses, curricula, programs, and products
will be maintained and sustained in the community college. Indeed, as notably
flexible and innovate places, we might do well to experiment and to re-experiment,
as California’s Mount San Antonio College has been reported to be doing.
Mt SAC has launched an online news site about campus events and activities
alongside another online-delivered news source with a “Buzz Feed”/”Vice”
flavor, as Poynter’s Mullin has written. Mount San Antonio teachers and
students in journalism have decided, Mullin writes, “to reach out and shake
people and say, what do we need to do to make you care?” This is a pro-active
move to save the J.

In one of the districts
where I teach, a sister college of mine is being reactive instead. The dean of
humanities has decided that the school newspaper will be shut down after more
than five decades, and journalism courses from 101 onward will no longer exist.
At the college where I teach most, journalism has never been an option for
students; it has not been considered to be worthwhile in almost any sense. But
at the third college in this three-college district, the student newspaper has
remained a strong force for discussion, debate, and cross-disciplinary dialogue
since the late 1940’s when the school began.

Elder High School
journalist Seth Sturwold summed up a journalism commentary this spring, 2018,
by quoting from British novelist and essayist E. M. Forster: “How do I know
what I think until I see what I say?...Articulating one’s ideas in written form
— seeing what one thinks — is the surest sign that one truly
understands...Journalism plays a strong role in both writing and the exchange
of ideas; its importance, therefore, cannot be ignored.”

For whatever reason,
whether it be Trump-bump or the turning point of the J, we at the community
college must foster the assiduous news-gathering and analysis that underlie
good journalism, teaching students how to be intelligent consumers of the news,
how to be skillful and responsible reporters, and how to search and do triage
through the deluge of digital data threatening to drown out the real in a fog
of fake.